A player who read our article about players cards and their not impacting a slot’s outcome had this question to ask:
Then why when I take out my money and don’t put in a card does the slot go off?
Alan L.
We would chalk this up to one part luck, one part confirmation bias.
To review, confirmation bias is the natural human tendency to spot examples that fit the theory that they’ve come up with.
In this case, there are some players who swear pulling their players card out and playing without it yields a better result. But slots are designed to do their thing over millions of spins – that level of spins is something many slot players won’t reach for years, let alone with or without a players card in it.
Think about what you’re proposing – imagine the loophole of taking a card out and winning. Why would casinos allow such a loophole to exist, and why wouldn’t so many more people be exploiting it?
The reality is that players card systems may be installed in a slot, but they have very limited things they can do to a slot. They are mostly there to collect data (which is the primary point of a players card system) – the most interactive it gets tends to be around accessing slot play or point play.
Meanwhile, while a players card doesn’t impact your paybacks, it does heavily impact your offers. And with casinos willingly offering 20 to 40 percent back of a player’s expected losses through offers, that’s a pretty big risk to take under the presumption you’ll get bigger wins, and that casinos will somehow allow such a loophole.
Casinos give offers because they want the data. They have no incentive to give you better payouts in exchange for no data. This actually works against what the casinos want from you for using a players card. Otherwise they’d have no reason to install these systems to begin with – it’s a lot of money and effort to then reward players who don’t use them.
So what you’re saying that you see is just an observation that if you kept diligent records each time you did it, would eventually not hold up across more and more sessions. Over the lifetime of a slot machine, this idea won’t bear any more fruit than playing with a card, given how slots are designed.
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I go in a casino with my players card..I lose $400…i pull it out..not using it and winn$800….So..if you won a jackpot in the past…the casino knows your playing that machine and they control it to have less wins..thus to gain some of their payouts
Hey Tony – players card software are unable to change the payout of the machine. And even if they did, you can still win a jackpot on a lower payout percentage – in the short term slots will vary quite widely from their expect payback over time.. So no, you can use your players card without worry.
My wife won to hand pays back to back without her card when she got the second hand pay she put her card back in she lost $1000 dollars so she took it back out and won her money back
That’s a very interesting coincidence, but is not indicative of anything relating to players cards. Slots achieve their expected payouts over long periods of time and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of spins. A short session can do just about anything, players card or not.
I had to laugh a little about this topic. I see old ladies taking out their card and putting it back in after every spin and they are spinning 75 cents a spin. I asked one why they were doing it and they said, the casino thinks I’m playing a lot of different machines by doing this and they give me good luck.
I smiled and advised her that her theory was 100% wrong and she said I’ll prove it.
She asked me to sit down at the same exact game next to her and that we would bet the same amount on each spin and that she would win more over 10 spins than I would leaving my card in.
I indulged her and we took turns 1 spin at a time she went 0 for 10 while I went 4 for 10. She said it was a fluke and asked if I would do it again.
Sure enough she again went 0 for 10 with her method and I went 3 for 10 but hit a bonus round.
She was so sure I worked for the casino and had some trick to make me win. She stomped off and I felt bad but she was just mired in conspiracy theories.
It is pretty funny what some will believe about slots – superstition in gambling is a big deal!